Honeydew Green Tea Frappe

Beverages, Beverages.
Green tea is especially clean tasting, grassy and refreshing served iced. Here the intoxicating perfume of a hauntingly sweet honeydew melon is perfectly layered with the crisp spring taste of green tea, either Chinese Dragonwell (Lung Ching), Japanese Sencha, or even a green Darjeeling tea from India. 

Honeydew Green Tea Frappe

Ingredients

Quantity Ingredients
3 tbsp loosely packed green tea leaves of your choice
2 ounces crystallized ginger, roughly chopped
4 cups cubed ripe honeydew melon
2 cups ice cubes made from distilled water
Superfine sugar to taste
Garnishes:
Thinly sliced honeydew melon
crystallized ginger in long pieces
fresh ginger juice

Directions

1. Chill 4 tall glasses. Brew the tea leaves in 4 cups boiling water, allowing them to steep 4 minutes. Pour the tea through a fine-meshed sieve, pressing hard on the leaves to extract all the liquid. 2. Add the crystallized ginger to the brewed tea and let cool until it becomes infused with the ginger flavor, about 15 minutes, or longer if time allows. Chill in refrigerator until cold. Pass liquid through sieve to remove ginger pieces. (For a more spicy flavor, fresh ginger root can be substituted.) 3. Pur�e the melon and ice in the jar of an electric blender. Add tea-ginger infusion and process just to blend. Pour into tall chilled glasses and sweeten to taste with superfine sugar. Add a dash of fresh ginger juice if available. Garnish with a thin slice of honeydew wrapped with a slice of crystallized ginger. 

Source: Cooking with Tea by Robert Wemischner and Diana Rosen, Periplus Editions, 2000.